Disk Director does not see any attached USB Pen Drives (USB Thumb Drives, USB Sticks, whatever you want to call them); only the internal hard drives on my PC. Partition Magic, however, can see and operate on the Pen Drives just fine. I'd rather use Disk Director though because of the richer feature set.

I've searched this forum and found a couple of statements that seem to indicate that Disk Director cannot work with drives considered to be removable. I sure would like to be able to use Disk Director, so please, Acronis, consider this as a feature request for future builds.

Is there a workaround? Is there any way to use Disk Director with these drives?

Acronis Support can speak for themselves but, typically, a thumb drive is small enough, 0.5 to 2 GB ?, that it's a relatively simple matter to save it's contents en masse, if necessary, to a folder on a hard drive and then do any partitioning you want to do with the Disk Management console in Windows XP - not sure if you're running XP. That's how I would handle it for now although I agree that would be a desirable capability in ADD.

it's a relatively simple matter to save it's contents en masse, if necessary, to a folder on a hard drive and then do any partitioning you want to do with the Disk Management console in Windows XP

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True enough, but the partitioning tools in XP aren't very flexible nor can they work with Linux partitions. That's why we purchased Disk Director, correct? And if Partition Magic is considered to be a competing product, then I'd hope that Acronis would want to match or better them on features.

Are you running the Windows version of Partition Manager when you observe this behavior or the stand-alone (bootable) version?

I have a copy of PM installed on a bootable USB thumb drive (or you can create a bootable rescue CD). If I boot the PC from this copy when there is simultaneously another USB thumb drive plugged in, then PM can see both thumb drives.

I also have Acronis Disk Director on a bootable USB thumb drive, but when booting the PC from this copy then I cannot see other connected USB thumb drives. The Windows version of DD doesn't see them either.

That's good news. These USB thumb drives are becoming more popular for storing complete operating systems. I have a 1 GB drive that is partitioned and contains a complete Live Linux distribution with my personal preferences and programs stored on the second partition.

I had to use the Linux command lines to set up the drive partitions and to format the drive. Partition Magic almost worked but it had the annoying feature of changing all of the drive labels to ALL CAPS, which Linux didn't like.

It would definitely help a lot of people if you could partition and manage these drives with Acronis Disk Director.

Are you running the Windows version of Partition Manager when you observe this behavior or the stand-alone (bootable) version?

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I was running the Windows version of PM, which I have since removed. I bought my version from PowerQuest, and AFAIK, the only option was to create two recovery floppies, which stopped working when I built a new machine. I might have been inclined to stick with it, had I been able to create other bootable media, which is one reason I switched to DD10. Trying to pair down unused apps, I've since removed PM8.01, so I can't go back and check. I'm glad to hear that Acronis is going to add additional support for USB thumb drives.